Individual increasingly uses smartphones with strong computational power, information connectivity, and social capability. Taking Singapore as an example, the penetration of smartphones in 2013 had reached 87%. As the number of people using smartphones rises, the scanning of 2D barcodes for various activities also increases. According to Wikipedia, a 2D barcode is a 2-dimensional way of representing information, which can be used to store text, a URL and/or other long information. A 2D barcode may be presented to a customer in a certain location, for the user to photograph using his smartphone, and the image is passed wirelessly to a server, which downloads information to the smartphone relating to the location. In one example, the 2D barcode relates to a product which is for sale, and this provides a convenient solution for customers to obtain offers and information without complex operations; in fact, recognition technology is becoming mainstream for mobile branding.
However, current mobile branding using 2D barcodes is quite boring for users. For one thing, the information returned to the smartphone is the same for any customer whose smartphone receives the 2D barcode. Furthermore, the information generated based on the 2D barcode is generally very limited (e.g. simple text with static images). By comparison, users are able to get a vast amount of information about a product online (such as text descriptions, video advertisements, and social recommendations), which makes product banding and advertisement very easy and multi-dimensional. Thus, there is a big gap between offline shopping (retailing) using 2D barcodes, and online branding and advertising. Offline, customers are not able to obtain the abundant information about a certain product which is available online, e.g. product information, statistics, advertisement, social comments from friends and interested community etc. This prevents the customers from trying new products and services during offline retailing.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a shopping experience at a retail location, which would augment the offline shopping experience with the enjoyable elements of online shopping, in terms of visual experience, user interaction experience, technology enabling experience and so on, to brand the products personalized with fun.
Storytelling is a kind of activity that appears everywhere in our daily life for people to share information and convey ideas. It has been available throughout human history, and creates a great impact to every aspect of human life. In business, storytelling is considered as the ultimate weapon of success [1]. A compelling story is crucial to the success of a product or service. The customer needs to convince himself/herself to choose one product rather than its competitors. As well as fundamental information, a story contains culture, value and more besides, and is able to connect people emotionally. As a mixture of conventional storytelling and user interactions, interactive storytelling in the virtual/digital environment enables the users to interact with the storyteller in real-time, so that dynamic and personalized stories can be generated to provide unique experience. This has become a hot area in today's interactive storytelling research. It may use an “agent” which is a software entity that can sense, reason and act. The storyteller agent can run itself to pursue its own goals of unique story event mobile and proactively. A number of research works have been done to create intelligent agents which can conduct storytelling smartly [3, 4, 5, 6].